Klaus Barbie

Klaus Barbie (25 October 1913-23 September 1991) was a Hauptsturmfuhrer of the SS of Nazi Germany during World War II, nicknamed "the Butcher of Lyon" for his torture of French Resistance fighters at Lyon. After the war, he fled to South America and played a major role in Bolivian politics, helping in the capture and execution of Che Guevara as well as supporting the 1980 Cocaine Coup by Luis Garcia Meza Tejada. In 1983, after the fall of Garcia Meza's military dictatorship, he was extradited to France and died in prison in 1991.

Biography
Klaus Barbie was born on 25 October 1913 in Bad Godesberg, German Empire (present-day Bonn, Germany), descended from the French Barbier family, which had left France after the French Revolution in the 1790s. Barbie was abused by his alcoholic father, who was left with a hatred of the French after fighting at the Battle of Verdun during World War I in 1916. Barbie gave up his studies as an academic after his father and brother had died in 1933, and he instead joined the Nazi Party and the SS. In November 1942, he was assigned to Lyon, France, where he became the chief of the local Gestapo unit. In this post, he tortured several French Resistance fighters and executed several more, becoming known as "the Butcher of Lyon" for his crimes. However, in 1947 the US Army recruited him into its Counterintelligence Corps during the Cold War, and the United States spirited him to Bolivia via ratlines after France demanded his extradition to be tried as a war criminal. Barbie became a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Bolivian Army and was also an arms dealer, and he had excellent relations with Bolivian strongmen such as Hugo Banzer and Luis Garcia Meza Tejada, assisting in the 1967 capture of Che Guevara during his Bolivian Campaign and in the 1980 Cocaine Coup. However, in 1971 Nazi hunters located him, and in 1983 President Hernan Siles extradited him to France after leading a popular uprising against the dictatorship. On 4 July 1987, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, and he died in 1991 in a prison in Lyon, ironically the place where he had jailed and tortured several French people.